An important area in the brain associated with language development is called Wernicke's area. Wernicke's area is located on the left side of the brain in the temporal lobe and is responsible for speech comprehension. Because of its function of language comprehension it is located near the part of the brain that is associated with decoding sound input. Contrary to Wernicke's area, Broca's area is related to the production of speech and the production of facial expressions. These two areas simultaneously work together giving us our ability to communicate.
Speech comprehension is one that is very complex. You could notice its complexity by listening to a foreign language and paying attention to all the various sounds the speaker is making through is vocal chords. The first level of decoding a speaker's flow of words is understanding that the sound that you are hearing is a language from another person and not from a foreign object. The second level consists of sound discrimination. It is here where the listener associates the acoustic characteristics of each word and associates meaning to them from their memory. The third level of speech comprehension is correlating the message from the language to previous memories associated with the prose of the message. If another person is talking to you about a chair the following is what your brain will process:
-All of the instances of chairs in existence anywhere
-Instances of chairs and exist in your imagination
-All the characteristics of chairs
-All the things you may do with chairs
-All the other concepts you may link with chairs
The fourth level of understanding a given piece of language is relating the message's meaning with an emotional association. For example, if a person were to talk to you about a dog and you were a dog owner feelings of compassion and love would eventually consume your mind because of your personal relationship with your dog.
Following the fourth level of language understanding is the final and fifth level of language comprehension. This new message which has been decoded by your brain either contains previous relative memories associated with this message or does not have any any associations. If your memory has relative information to this new message then then previous information will now be tainted by this new message. For example, if someone told me about an issue with their dog and my thought process had made it to the fourth level then this person's pet problem would forever be ingrained in my memory. All previous connections in the brain are modified because of this story.
The five stages of understanding language and response to understood language can only be carried out because of the simultaneous bond of Wernicke's area and Broca's area. The corpus callosum creates a bridge between these two areas and allows them to work together to create a flow of synapses amongst neurons giving us the ability to smoothly communicate. The corpus callosum acts as a motherboard for the brain connecting many different components to carry out different functions.
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